I feel for you. It sounds like we are in a similar place. A wise man once reminded me to focus on the things I can control. I'm still trying to sort out what, exactly, those things are. You'd think those things would be easy to recognize.
For me, beginnersmind sorted those things out about as well as anybody has...
Originally Posted By: beginnersmind
The only things I can change are my attitudes, reactions and action toward the people, places and circumstances in my life.
Accomplishing a lot of this seems to lie in how we choose to look at what is happening to us, and whether we can see the situation for what it REALLY is, instead of buying into our programmed emotional states. It's so much easier to just let ourselves get swept away by emotion, and push logic, reason and understanding aside. Emotion doesn't take as much effort. It's already pre-wired! We follow the emotional pathways that have been set up by our own personal experiences of the past. We know how betrayal feels- the feelings make us go all Pavlovian and drive our conclusions into the same groove that we had when we first experienced that feeling, despite the fact that, if we were to force ourselves to look at the situation for what it is NOW instead of what it was then, we would have an opportunity to see, and therefore act, differently.
That's the funny thing about emotions- they're not logical.
And reprogramming learned response patterns can be a b*tch. Ask any smoker and/or alcoholic you run across......
PATIENCE AND FORTITUDE CONQUER ALL THINGS. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
DBing and MLC take their toll....Please provide exact CHANGE. -Jimbo
